eHealth Technologies Blog: Mark Lotman, Regional Vice President, eHealth Technologies
Have you ever wondered if your medical record and image retrieval process for referred patients is doing all it can for your department?
An inefficient process could be costing your department a loss in potential revenue from new patients, contributing to clinician frustration and burnout, and negatively impacting your patient satisfaction levels.
I put together a list of five questions that can help you determine if your workflows and processes are giving you a competitive edge.
- How much time does your staff spend on retrieving medical records for referred patients?First you must identify where the records reside, then locate contact information for that office or hospital. Instead of spending hours a day making follow-up phone calls to track down a patient’s records, your staff could spend just two minutes per patient to submit a patient record request through the eHealth Connect® online system.
- How long does it take to receive a comprehensive patient medical record, including images, pathology, and all relevant information for a referred patient?Once you send the records request – how long does it take for it to be sent to you? Two days, four days, ten days? How many follow-up calls do you need to make to ensure they are working on your request? Our customer service support team can remove that burden from your staff. Our typical turn-around-time to retrieve medical records is as little as one to five days.
- Do you get everything you need to have a productive first appointment, without any repeat testing or missing recordsHow complete are the outside records you are retrieving? If something can’t be found or the source of the records won’t respond to your requests, are you forced to schedule the patient anyway and see them without that critical information? Then what? The patient has to have repeat tests or come back after your department has more time to track down and obtain the missing records? This can severely impact your time to treatment and frustrate your clinicians and patients. Our team is a dedicated resource you can use to continue to follow-up, on a daily basis, until all the necessary records are obtained.
- Are you overwhelmed with sorting through hundreds or even thousands of paper faxes?Many health organizations spend too much time sorting through pages and pages of incoming papers faxes every day, and then have to scan and upload these paper records to their EMR. eHealth Technologies’ Integration services eliminates this cumbersome process by retrieving, organizing, and delivering medical records and images directly to your EMR and PACs system for easy access by your clinical team. Our services can help you avoid the time-consuming and costly process of QA’ing, downloading images from CDs, then uploading to your PACS system.
- How long does it take for the clinical team to review outside records and images?Depending on what types of records, images, and reports are needed, a clinician could be facing hundreds of pages of information that need to be reviewed prior to the patient’s first appointment. How long does it take the clinical team to find the most pertinent information they need? What if those outside records could be searchable, with key terms highlighted? And organized in chronological order by record type? That’s how eHealth Technologies prepares records for delivery with eHealth Connect® Clinical Intelligence services. Clinical teams rave about how our team organizes and prepares records for delivery, saving them time and making it easier for them to find the information they need.
At eHealth Technologies, we are committed to filling the gaps in healthcare interoperability that hinder a clinician’s ability to serve their patients and negatively impacts a patient’s experience. Our Clinical Optimization team works with hospitals and health systems all over the country – helping to re-organize resources and internal workflows to best compliment our services. The result is an efficient medical Record Retrieval process that supports clinicians’ needs and gives your department a competitive edge to grow patient volume and improve patient experience.
